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I built ByteDance's censorship machine

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Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#41

Post by vmception »

xwolfi wrote: post #35
svieira wrote: post #20

> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second. For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone…

Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all dep…

Correct, its not binary.

Its best case, average case and worst case, just like with algorithms on different data sets.

We already know that a benevolent dictatorship is the most efficient form of government, the best case in stewarding resources, it just lacks a secession path to maintain its efficiency, as dictatorships most frequently create worst case scenarios: worst stewarding of resources and no ability to dissent to correct it. No respect from the rest of the people on how the correction takes place, one coup just leads to another coup.

Inclusive democracies most frequently create average case scenarios of efficiency. They aren’t inherently better just because they’re inclusive. They can create best case and worst case scenarios too.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#42

Post by duxup »

lawl wrote: post #38
philg_jr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow journalists who have domain expertise in technology? You can use a shitty news article about a particular relevant topic that contains some questionable issues, and then search around for people that actually know what they are talking about. Exert some of your own effort to find good sources. Don't trust the first thing you read. This is ultimately the problem imo.

Yep, thats one solution. But then do you really need journalists? Ultimately this ends in you having a some people you trust in certain areas. Quite how it works in real life. E.g. real life friends asked me what i think of covid tracking apps because they trust me on topics like this. It's also not without failure modes. Lets say you just follow certain journalists/sleuths on certain topics that's basically filter b…

I feel like you asked the question and demonstrated how the answer is yes.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#43

Post by zepto »

throw373782 wrote: post #34

Anonymous source? Check. Unverifiable anecdotal evidence? Check. Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases. “Alarmingly, only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.” [0] [0] https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-chin...

> Somehow I’m not surprised that HN users don’t express the faintest bit of skepticism on topics that confirm their pre-existing biases.

Could it be that you are drawing conclusions without evidence here?

How do you know anything about the skepticism or biases of those who don’t express them?

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#44

Post by yters »

xwolfi wrote: post #35
svieira wrote: post #20

> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second. For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone…

Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all dep…

My main problem with dictatorships is mass concentration camps, mass executions, torture, human experimentation, etc.

Granted, democracies have done all the above, but diligent activists corrected the system, and the scale never reached that in dictatorships.

But yes, for your average citizen, dictatorship is probably not too bad.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#45

Post by areoform »

xwolfi wrote: post #35
svieira wrote: post #20

> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second. For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone…

Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all dep…

That’s discounting the forced sterilization, imprisonment, and extermination of the target du jour,

> One is an authoritative report documenting the systematic sterilization of Uighur women. The other was the seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of 13 tons of products made from human hair suspected of being forcibly removed from Uighurs imprisoned in concentration camps.

- https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjian...

> they only censor what nobody cares about: critics of the party

Saying that they only censor their critics and adding that they are only censoring “what no one cares about, critics of the party” is disturbing.

When one person can impose their will on you, it’s all rainbows and kitties until you disagree or step out of line. As I am guessing that the people who oppose forced sterilization and the other Nazi concentration camp policies (forced shaving of hair at camps for use as a product is a fairly distinct one) will end up censored and at those camps too?

These problems and issues might be out of sound and out of mind for now, but sooner or later, as the previous enemy starts to thin out, they will find new ones. And eventually, they’ll come for you too.

Often people who live in autocracies by choice do not believe such warnings. They are the intellectual equivalent of exercise and vitamins.

To make it clearer, here's what happens at the end of such regimes. Even for their supporters,

Towards the end of the war, the Nazis who were occupying the Netherlands blew up a town hall after inviting 134 people and their children to take shelter there. These people were of the right race. Most of them had done nothing against them. Some of them might have supported them.

They were the in-group until they weren't. They died because they weren't members of the party.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadhuisramp_Heusden

Being ambitiously evil, the Nazis also killed erstwhile embraced citizens at scale with the Dutch famine by blocking the transport of food from farms to citizens in their occupied territories. They did it because they could.

Perhaps this is still distant. Here's a shorter example. Almost all of the people Stalin directly ordered to be killed were his supporters.

They were the in-group until they weren't.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#46

Post by thisiszilff »

gumby wrote: post #10
jbob2000 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned". So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just wi…

> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. What? It’s all about the money. Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible. In the 1950s US the only people with ap…

It's true, in a way, society looks like what the people in power want society to look like because the people in power are those with money and people who figure out how to make more money get power. It's like you say, that TV and ads are on the trailing edge as people figure out how to keep up with the distribution of money in society.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#47

Post by lawl »

duxup wrote: post #42
lawl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, thats one solution. But then do you really need journalists? Ultimately this ends in you having a some people you trust in certain areas. Quite how it works in real life. E.g. real life friends asked me what i think of covid tracking apps because they trust me on topics like this. It's also not without failure modes. Lets say you just follow certain journalists/sleuths on certain topics that's basically filter b…

I feel like you asked the question and demonstrated how the answer is yes.

Well i also said i don't think journalism works in the post before. So my position on this is still that i don't think we have a solution.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#48

Post by slowmovintarget »

jbob2000 wrote: post #11
CharlesW wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted. If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.

And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?

It is definitively not. CCP has zero interest in sales. It is interested in preserving the party by controlling the populace, with special emphasis on ideology.

The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship, which is a completely different problem from a top-down, military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#49

Post by buran77 »

xwolfi wrote: post #35
svieira wrote: post #20

> As a young unicorn, ByteDance does not have strong government relationships like other tech giants do, so it's walking a tightrope every second. For those in free countries: when you build moderation tools and use them to silence political dissent "because you have to / to play the game" the game plays you. There is no one "too big" to be crushed by those with the material source of political power [1] and everyone…

Having been raised in a democracy and raising my kids in a dictatorship, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding from both side. People in democracies cannot comprehend how anyone in a dictatorship could live anything else than miserable, and people in dictatorship mostly see people in democracies as hypocrite imperialists who lie to themselves about who truly rules. The funny thing is that, well, it mostly all dep…

Moving between democracy and dictatorship several times in my life I can say this: it mainly boils down to how well your interests align with the interests of the one(s) in power. The main difference is that if your interests don't align you'll have a much harder life in a dictatorship than in a democracy, special cases (like Singapore) notwithstanding. For every Singapore there's more than one Myanmar.

Re: I built ByteDance's censorship machine

#50

Post by redwall_hp »

duxup wrote: post #18
nomay wrote: post #12

Censorship is imo Bytedance's lesser evil. The way this company destroys journalism is its biggest crime. Algorithm-driven "self-media" that ByteDance popularised (with Toutiao) has essentially wiped out news in China, anyone can write sensationalized and fabricated news-style stories on its platforms and compete with "mundane and boring" serious news，AND GET PAID, these self-media are so prevalent and low-brow that…

We have similar situations elsewhere. Folks rage about 'the media' (a term now so amorphous I can't tell what it means anymore, or if the person even reads / watches what they think of as the media), so we get lots of self research / internet sleuth type discovery on platforms like reddit. We had one on HN recently too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645 . I applaud the person for putting in the effort, but…

It was a sudden and dramatic shift. I spent years being critical of news establishments, due to things such as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect," poor science reporting, conflicts of interest or a distaste with the progressively shorter articles and lower quality writing. However, as of the last few years, I don't feel comfortable talking about that with most people anymore. Terms like "mainstream media" or vocal distrust of news establishments have become conservative political dogwhistles, and imply that the speaker has a tenuous grasp on the concept of "reality."

Essentially, the Overton Window has shifted from questioning journalistic ethics and quality to a binary "do you support actual news of events that really happened...or delusional fancies of YouTube personalities and stuff like QAnon?"

Honestly, it's disturbing.

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